Just Said It

I was in a meeting yesterday with a business partner. He's a smart guy and a great salesperson. He has a problem though. He has been running a company selling products for years, but now his products have hit the commodity cycle and he has to change.

He has become convinced he has to sell more services and move to solution sales. He is planning a lot of training to convert his current large sales force to a solution based sales force, and we were talking about the challenges of that.

Here is my advice on this subject from living through it in more than one industries.

1. Accept the fact that best product sales person will not be your best solution sales person. The process and the required skills are too different.

2. Training is an absolute requirement, but not an absolute solution.

3. Before you judge which sales person can make the change figure out first which ones are really willing to make the change. (I think it's more like converting a hockey player to a baseball player than it is like moving a shortstop to second base.)

4. You have to change your success metrics first. If you keep asking how many boxes or licenses they sold then it will be impossible to move forward.

This is an important subject. Let me know what you think and what advice you would have given?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

I have been watching company presentations all day at the Philadelphia IMPACT venture capital conference. It's been interesting. They have used a rapid response system to answer survey questions about the current, and future, economic trends.

The crowd, made up of a lot of smart bankers, lawyers, and business people, was about 80% optimistic. That's encouraging. I guess. As long as you ignore the fact that the same worldly mix failed to predict the 2008 crash.

That being said I am extremely optimistic about the near future. I am a pretty conservative person and I am ecstatic about last weeks election results. Not because I expect the new congressman to actually do anything, but mostly because I think there presence will restore stability to the previous "change everything" strategy of the executive and legislative branches. Instability and unpredictability are the real enemy of business.

That is not to say that we can't manage change. But too much change is scary, and scared business people tend to stand still and not move forward for the fear of falling backward. Even then we can only stand still so long before the paranoia of getting left behind takes over and you have to move.

The bottom line is that we have all been standing still too long and it's time to move forward and get our businesses growing again.

If we all believe we can move forward then the momentum will propel us all.

So, let's get to it.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad